19th October 2009 Archive

Microsoft has struggled with the best way to sell Visual Studio's application lifecycle management ever since it introduced Team System against IBM's Rational four years back. As the company prepares to release Visual Studio 2010 for Windows 7, Office 2010 and a new line Windows servers about to come on tap, Microsoft is taking another stab.

The most popular virtualization tool distributed by Sun Microsystems - and one whose future as an Oracle product is in question - is VirtualBox, and the software was just updated with a new 3.0.8 release.

A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have been studying how they can make cheap, low-powered, and relatively unimpressive server nodes gang up and do more work than the two-socket x64 server that is the workhorse of the IT industry. They have come up with an approach called FAWN, which is short for Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes.

Unified Communications (UC) is a pretty hot topic with analysts and vendors alike. Yet despite a push back from the market on the vagaries of the proposition and questions around ROI, vendors still haven’t nailed how they communicate with businesses.

Do you remember the first time you saw a laptop? Shiny bright LED screen, pixels individually visible, about the size of a breeze block. Portability probably didn’t concern the IT department because nobody in their right mind would try to carry one out of the office. But they did.

The BBC is taking a bit of stick for rewriting Humpty Dumpty to protect wide-eyed kiddies from the terrible realisation that the combined ingenuity of all the king's horses and all the king's men proved insufficient to reassemble the poor chap.

NASA chiefs have insisted that their recent mission to crash a pair of spacecraft into the eternally-dark crater deeps of the lunar south pole - which seemed at first look to have produced underwhelming results - was in fact a "smashing success", with definite evidence of a debris plume detected.

Mozilla disabled two Microsoft developed Firefox add-ons over the weekend after deciding the applications posed a security risk. It has since revised its safety assessment and set about removing the plugins from its blacklist.

A Conservative government would scrap the planned 50 pence per month tax on every landline - which the current government plans to use to subsidise faster broadband in rural regions - "as soon as possible", according to the shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt.

Legendary underground comic artist Robert Crumb has caused a bit of a stir with his illustrated Book of Genesis - complete with biblical rumpy-pumpy and "gratuitous" violence, as the Telegraph puts it.

The time of the eBook reader may have come at last. With Amazon’s Kindle leading the charge and Barnes and Noble working with UK OLED display maker Plastic Logic for a similar offering next year, there’s growing awareness of the possible market for electronic readers. Interead’s Cool-er is an independent reader, trying to carve itself a niche.

Microsoft played spot the difference over the weekend with statements on Saturday and Sunday that hinted at “steady progress” for the recovery of data its Danger subsidiary lost for many Sidekick customers.

An anthropologist has described modern man as “the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet”, with even Arnold Schwarzenegger at his muscular peak no match for a Neanderthal woman in the arm-wrestling stakes.

Woebegone British swingbellies have launched a campaign against anti-lardo "hate crime" and discrimination, even as a survey of possibly gutbusting Germans has revealed that being "overweight" is actually not a health hazard.

IBM has put an executive in charge of its server, storage and chip business after the incumbent was put on a temporary leave of absence in the wake of an insider trading scandal that erupted last Friday.

Systems management software maker BMC Software continues to snap up other software players as it bulks up to do battle with the likes of IBM, CA, Hewlett-Packard, and now EMC in its chosen market. Today, the company paid an undisclosed amount to acquire British software company and BMC-partner Tideway Systems.

The final quarter of 2009 is just getting under way, and Gartner's analysts have assembled to give 2009, the IT industry's "worst year ever", a happy send off. Well, more like a mumbled good riddance as it welcomes the prospect of a better 2010.